5 Tips on How (not) to Compose Music at a Cottage

1. Stay offline, baby!

Are you used to reaching for your phone right after waking up and scrolling through social networks, reading all those disturbing headlines on news websites or checking if someone has texted you? Then, to properly isolate your band, definitely don't choose places where the signal is good. Yes, getting angry about the current political situation can make for a punchy protest song, but more likely it will just create another feeling of futility in your head and you'll end up trapped in the usual merry-go-round of downloading "interesting" videos – from cute animals through guitar tutorials to life-hacks of all kinds.

Hold it! It's exactly this dunghill, er, information that you came here to cut yourself off from, to make at least a cubic meter of space in your head for musical creation. So avoid all those internet sites and use your cell phone as a weather indicator, recording device or metronome at most.

2. Set up rules

Have you rented a cottage in a picturesque region unknown to you where there is so much to see that every day you are tempted to go on a trip to a different landmark, to see the beauty of nature or the trophies of the local ethnographic museum? Forget it, and instead plan a regular, undisturbed routine in your temporary dwelling, with daily repetitive activities, including time for meals, walks and sports. This will leave plenty of room to sit with your instrument or pencil and paper (or computer program), trying to catch the muse.

3. Forget about your job

The difficult life of a musician is often characterized by the fact that in order to be one, you must also have a daily job, quite remote from the creative spark of music. But if you've already managed to carve out a week off in your busy work schedule (this is especially tricky if you're a freelancer), please, PLEASE don't let a minute of dealing with necessary emails, catching up on backlog or rescuing your colleagues by consulting over chat or phone, thinking that without your presence the world will stop spinning for a week. You will never compose anything that way – at most, you'll collapse out of all that stress.

4. Bottle muse in moderation

Perhaps you intend to invoke your musical muse with great intensity in the wilderness, so you stop at the nearest supermarket on your way to meet the rural-rustic contemplation and thoroughly replenish your bottle stock (or another source of performance enhancers). However, the compositional style of allegro con spirito – that is, "fast and with spirits" – has its pitfalls: while you may not resist otherwise unthinkable musical ideas in your intoxication, your playing technique and ability to intonate accurately shall definitely be diminished. You usually realise this the very next day when you listen to unique, but completely unpublishable recordings, from which you vainly decipher what your idea about the melody and rhythm actually was.

The darkest scenario is when you break free from your chains out of sheer excitement over the sudden freedom and in an attempt to break creative self-censorship, and experience considerable nausea the next day. This can happen to anybody, it's just a bit counterproductive when this attitude takes over for your whole vacation and nothing remains of the plans to compose.

5. Set realistic goals

As can be seen from the above-mentioned cheerless options, it definitely does not pay off to schedule a creative week in the wilderness as the only time off in your otherwise hectic life – and expect to compose material for an entire album in those few evenings. If you can't carve out time for yourself and your creative urges on a more frequent and regular basis, your brain is unlikely to switch from workaholic to bohemian in a few precious days. And there is perhaps nothing worse than making composing music just another of your many work tasks, trying to wring a few brilliant musical themes out of yourself every day.

Maybe what you need most of all right now is just to switch off, not force yourself into anything and relax to clear your head. And maybe that one single riff that you thought of on the fourth day at breakfast (and which you immediately condemned as "banal", "boring", or "too similar to that song by XY") will turn out to be the base of your next successful hit.